Monthly Archives: July 2011

If I could time-travel back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I would console Khakheperresenb with the familiar paraphrase of Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.” Or André Gide’s comforting remark, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Originality, after all, includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story!

Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint, Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear. Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.

I wonder how much of our modern angst over originality in art is related to our conceptions of individuality, as in the individual personality, the one-and-only author, being responsible for this particular thought. Without that perceived importance of specific credit being acknowledged, does it matter how derivative a song or story is? It will still be new to someone.

On a slightly related note, it occurs to me that those who eagerly anticipate life-extending medicines and technologies might want to consider how jaded and weary they’ll feel if they aren’t able to forget most of what they’ve seen and experience the world anew again.

Maybe those people living paycheck to paycheck who are running out of money at the end of the month are learning to see that it’s actually best that way. They are enjoying the really important things that deprivation can reacquaint them with—togetherness, family, nature, and so on. Likewise, underemployment is a chance to enjoy the riches of leisure, if you can block out the nagging insecurities of precarity from your mind.

…Has there been a general shift in values, though? Do people want less stuff and are thus willing to work less? Do we choose unemployment over drudgery and better appliances? Are we all eager to “take our share of the economic surplus in leisure,” as it’s sometimes technocratically expressed? (I wonder if this is a reason new households aren’t forming. Opting out of parenting, say, is a frugal lifestyle choice.) Reading values from macroeconomic data seems like slippery hermeneutics. (The mere fact of a drop in consumer spending doesn’t necessarily mean a drop in the desire to spend, unless you assume revealed preference is the only reality that matters.) Wilkinson makes the case that for creative-class types, being an economic free agent isn’t so terrible once you choose autonomy over material goods. Rather than make as much as you can, you can be a “threshold earner,” make what you need for your minimalist lifestyle, and then segue into “medium chill” mode, to use David Roberts’s coinage: “This is me,” Wilkinson admits. “I don’t want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work.”

Well. It’s easy to romanticize poverty, but I’ve spent a lot of time worrying like crazy about not being overdrawn at key times of the month, and I’ve spent months on end having no less than a few thousand in the bank at any given time, and I know which one I prefer by far. The stress of never knowing if you have enough to get groceries this week or pay the rent on time is no small thing, and probably contributes to a lot of ruined relationships. Make and save your money if you can, by all means. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash. Staying out of debt is the most important thing, though. One less chain around your leg when it comes to your employment options. One less way for the bastards to hold you by the short hairs.

To some extent The 27 Club represents an observational fallacy. There are only so many ages at which a person can die, after all, so of course a lot of famous people have died at any particular age you want to consider. The 28 Club, if there is such a thing, includes The Big Bopper, Jeff Buckley, Shannon Hoon, Heath Ledger, Brandon Lee, two Kennedys and Caligula. The 29 Club? Marc Bolan, Anne Bronte, Josh Hancock, Christopher Marlowe, DJ Screw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ronnie van Zant, Hank Williams and yet another Kennedy. It’s always tragic when talented people die young and our society – perhaps any society – feels an excess of pain when we see wasted potential. We can’t help imagining what might have been accomplished over the course of a full lifetime.

We spend a lot less time thinking about those who do great things by the age of 27 and then live out long, comparatively pedestrian lives, though. That kind of narrative doesn’t make especially good fodder for songwriters or filmmakers, as it turns out.

Talented. Potential. Accomplishment. Oh, how dreadfully bourgeois to drag such considerations into art! Again, what’s this obsession with longevity? Seriously, what shall we call the crowded club of artists who put out two or three great records and then spent a long, slow decline into mediocrity and the sort of mortifying, self-unaware embarrassment that you watch with one hand clamped over your face, peeking out between two fingers? (Besides “The Metallica and Aerosmith Club.”) There are fates worse than death, you know.

Until that moment comes, Clendinen says, he is having a good time, appreciating what he calls “the Good Short Life.” He believe it is fine, sweet and decorous—fully and naturally human—not to make old bones. We could use more of this strain in our national conversation. In which we assume (if talking about future Federal deficits) that millions of people can and should live as close to forever as they can. In which we assume (if talking about our own lives) that we’re obligated to hang on until the last machine-aided breath. In which we assume, if talking about technology, that the right question is how it can extend our lease on Earth for centuries—instead of asking what point and value all those lingering years might have.

It is sad to exit at age 27, or even at age 66. But it doesn’t mean one didn’t have a good life.

I’m fortunate enough to have someone in my life who makes me want to enjoy many, many years of shared experiences. It wasn’t always that way, though. I used to often think that living until my late forties, early fifties would be all the life I’d need. Some of that was melancholic thinking, yes, but some of it was also a realistic sense that that age was a good balance between wisdom and zest, serenity and passion. It’s the sort of thing I know better than to say in most company, but when I hear about someone who died before reaching senility, the nursing home, etc., my thought is never “Oh, how sad, they went too soon,” but rather, “Did they like the story they told?” I mean it in the Nietzschean sense of creating your life like a work of art, making yourself into an interesting character. If you reflect on the life you’ve lived, does it feel compelling to you? Would you be interested to read about the character you’ve inhabited? It’s about living well, not living long.

“Names are loaded, full of pitfalls and possibilities, and can prove obstacles to writing…” Ciuraru explains. “A change of name, much like a change of scenery, provides a chance to begin again.”

With skilled research and palpable empathy, Ciuraru chronicles the lives of secretive storytellers – those who wished to communicate without being known. In our tell-all age, such shyness might seem strange, but there was a time when pseudonyms were common.

…But – as Nom de Plume reveals – pseudonyms can also facilitate honesty. Without fear of retribution, authors like George Eliot felt empowered to express their controversial views on religion and politics.

It’s like the Buddhist saying about the finger pointing at the moon: My everyday personality isn’t important, so I try to remove myself from the picture and let my words and ideas speak for themselves. Conversation will always gravitate toward gossip and irrelevancies, alas and alack, but goddamnit, I’m going to do my best to keep my little nook of the Internet focused on the life of the mind!

It’s true, though — I express myself more openly and honestly here than I do in everyday life. Why, you lucky few know more about me — the stuff I consider important, at any rate — than people I’ve known for years and seen on a regular basis. Don’t you feel special now?

“The truth explains everything,” runs one of Grayling’s “Proverbs.” It’s an article of faith for these writers. But they must sense, even as they affirm it, that the real threat to the cult of human reason in the 21st Century is not the religious, but epistemological. We live today under the dispensation of what one contemporary wise man calls “truthiness.” In the great ecumenical marketplace of our culture, belief systems thrive not on compulsion, or verifiability, but on narrative interest.

I think he’s right. Religion is certainly a major repository of unreason, but it’s not the only one. More prevalent is the widespread cynicism that says no one can be trusted, that earnest truth-seeking is a quaint and outdated brand in the ecumenical marketplace, that you might as well just tell yourself whatever story flatters your vanity and seek out an echo chamber to reinforce it. It’s not even that we can’t agree on the answers of how to live, we can’t even agree on how to frame the questions, or whether to even bother asking them at all.

The notion that the United States needs to begin moving away from its consumer economy — toward more of an investment and production economy, with rising exports, expanding factories and more good-paying service jobs — has become so commonplace that it’s practically a cliché. It’s also true. And the consumer bust shows why. The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.

Sure, house and car sales will eventually surpass their old highs, as the economy slowly recovers and the population continues expanding. But consumer spending will not soon return to the growth rates of the 1980s and ’90s. They depended on income people didn’t have.

The only major economic burden I have to bear is a mortgage, and even that has me working longer hours than I want at a job that often drives me insane. I don’t mind making the sacrifice for the time being, but I would much rather look to simplify my life even more than struggle indefinitely like this. I have no idea how most people manage to sleep at night with the amount of debt they’ve incurred for all the shit they have that they don’t need.

But what Aurelius was talking about was heartache, depression, grief, despair, and disappointment. He called himself a Stoic and Stoicism had long claimed and developed the idea that we could think our way out of the pains of living. There were lots of different ways they used to reframe life so it didn’t hurt so much. The big idea was that you are part of the giant machine of humanity and the universe and you shouldn’t be taking so seriously the specifics of what happens to little you. Stuff’s gonna happen. Roll with it. Aurelius tries to cheer up his own blue self, and you, thusly:

>For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.

But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe.- Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms… and be quiet at last.

… But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee.- See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed, and be quiet at last.

Consider that the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they who will praise thee.

This then remains…all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

I’ve never really liked that about Stoicism. It feels slightly… disingenuous to me. Not that one shouldn’t try to view frustrating circumstances from different perspectives, but trying to hop back and forth from the universal perspective, where nothing really matters because the heat death of the universe blah blah blah, and the individual perspective that we have to inhabit just to function as human beings in a social context seems like trying to have it both ways. You can’t derive meaning and joy from the things you consider most valuable and then try to brush off their eventual loss with philosophical sleight-of-hand tricks. Some losses may indeed be too intense for a person to bear — but so what? The fact that we don’t ultimately matter should be an invitation to feel more deeply while we are here.

Masculinity reached a certain point in film where it became so ridiculous that it couldn’t go any further. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the perfect male in the “Terminator” pictures, in that he was made of metal and he was super-built. What happened then is that masculinity sort of got chipped away until you had a character like John McClane in “Die Hard”, who was slightly more vulnerable and, as such, imperfect. That was almost the beginning of dismantling the super-male into something more normal. Through that process, what used to be the Beta male became the Alpha male. You’ve got people like Seth Rogen, I guess myself, and Steve Carell and Paul Rudd—all slightly more normal guys that are taking the lead roles because it’s okay now to be imperfect and nerdy.

Okay, dismantling boneheaded machismo is fine and all, but I’m still staking out the Omega Male territory for myself and putting up a barbed-wire fence and a crocodile-infested moat. Not every outcast is hungering for acceptance and respectability.

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.

Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most…

Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s “nature”: this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, “the anti-natural” enthusiast.

Finally — what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did not one have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? Didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself, and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing – this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this.

Self-immolation in the Buddhist tradition is not the same thing as political self-immolation: the mindsets and motivations involved are different, and so is the societal impact. Yet even though the importance of religious-cultural background is undeniable in the case of the Vietnamese monks, political self-immolations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become a major symbolic gesture in their own right. Still, regardless of their different specific aims (mystical enlightenment or political protest), all self-immolators share the same desire to transcend the human body as a strictly biological entity and to turn it, through fire, into a tool for other, higher purposes.

…Martyrdom (political martyrdom included) is as much the deed of the one who performs it as it is of those who witness it. The self-immolator’s death, no matter how spectacular, will remain utterly meaningless unless it is captured by a receptive gaze—that is, unless it occurs within a community eaten up by guilty thoughts and feelings. The guilt can be due to several factors: habitual toleration of injustices, collective cowardice and ethical numbness, passivity in front of political oppression, a general sense of defeat in front of a force (totalitarian government, foreign military occupation, and so on) perceived as invincible, if illegitimate. In other words, self-immolators are effective in societies that feel responsible in part for their servitude, where feelings of complicity, mutual resentment, and distrust have not only poisoned people’s private lives, but also undermined whatever social life is left.

We seem to be somewhere between the second and third rung — we pay lip service to the idea of “future blisses and justices”, and we’re still big on renouncing the body as a biological entity for, uh, “higher” purposes, but we seem to be worshiping the entertaining spectacle rather than the nothing. Self-immolation would barely stay in the news cycle for a few days here.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.